SOURCE: "Gald-Handing Her Way Through the World," in The New York Times Book Review, March 12, 1995, pp. 6-7.

[In the following excerpt, Kirby favorably assesses Winter Numbers, noting Hacker's "fluid" poetic style and her ability to handle ideas about death and middle age.]

The history of recent literature is the history of the phrase "Only connect." Writers and readers have taken these words from E. M. Forster's Howards End as an exhortation, with "only" meaning "merely" or perhaps "exclusively." But the phrase can also be read ironically, despairingly, even interrogatively, with a rising borscht belt intonation, so that "Only connect?" becomes "Are you kidding me?"

At a time when so many writers seem to be measuring life from a considerable remove, it is invigorating to watch Marilyn Hacker glad-handing her way through the world with a warm facility. And a formalism so colloquial as to undo any readerly stereotypes...